maintaining-python-tests

A guide for maintaining existing Python tests, including pytest and Django test suites. It focuses on preserving realistic regression coverage while reducing unnecessary test work and waiting.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reducing test or CI time, investigating slow test groups, removing stale migration tests, sharing setup, or improving test ownership. New coverage uses a separate testing guide.
Why use it?
It requires measuring which tests consume the most resources and avoids deleting or weakening coverage without evidence and approval.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/posthog/posthog-foss/maintaining-python-tests
Any agent
npx skills add PostHog/posthog-foss --skill maintaining-python-tests
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-foss

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,048 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00110 $0.02048
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.01024
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00410
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00205

Measured 2d ago against content hash e87edd7ca2fb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

maintaining-python-tests scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.agents/skills/maintaining-python-tests/SKILL.md · 214 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 214 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maintaining Python tests

Before you propose a change to how the suite runs in CI, check things already tried. It records measured verdicts on test parallelism, sharding, and coverage-based selection, so a rejected approach is not rebuilt.

Use this skill for an existing Python test suite. Use /writing-tests before adding or substantially changing coverage. Use /fixing-flaky-tests when intermittent failure is the main problem.

The goal is not a smaller test count. The goal is a suite that catches the same realistic regressions with less compute, less waiting, and less maintenance.

Principles

  1. Measure before changing code. Rank tests by total observed work, not by one slow local run.
  2. Preserve behavior coverage. Keep cases that exercise different validation, persistence, integration, or output paths.
  3. Remove only expired or redundant coverage. Get explicit approval before deleting a test.
  4. Share expensive infrastructure, not mutable test state. Preserve isolation with unique IDs, schemas, tables, topics, or tenants.
  5. Measure after merge. Local results prove the mechanism. Fresh master data proves the result in CI.
  6. Separate testcase work from suite wall time. A change can reduce summed testcase time and not change the slowest pytest suite.

Read measurement.md before you query timing data or report an improvement. Read optimization-patterns.md when you select a fix.

Workflow

1. Define the result

Write down the user problem before choosing a test:

  • Reduce total test compute.
  • Reduce the slowest pytest suite.
  • Remove expired maintenance burden.
  • Restore test ownership.
  • Reduce repeated external-service setup.

These results need different measurements. Do not claim faster CI when only summed test call time decreased.

2. Rank current work

Use recent PostHog test spans from master when available. Start with a complete window after the latest relevant merge.

Read the full file on GitHub · 214 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 214 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A e87edd7ca2fb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maintaining-python-tests is a skill published in the GitHub repository PostHog/posthog-foss (713 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 2,048 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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